The Lynx
XR-5K18's main engine firing at XCOR's base at the Air and Space
Port in the Mojave Desert

Spencer Lowell

This article was taken from the June 2013 issue
of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of
additional content by subscribing online.

Late in the autumn of 2012, Richard Branson hosted a party
on Necker, his private island in the Caribbean. His guests were
also his customers: a handful of the millionaires and billionaires
who had bought $200,000 (£130,000) tickets for Branson's Virgin
Galactic -- a company that promises to send them, briefly, into
space (see
Wired 4.13). Some signed up as long ago as 2004, thinking that
they'd be astronauts within four years. They're still
waiting.

One of those sitting on the beach at
Necker was Michiel Mol, a Dutch entrepreneur. Today, Mol is a
Formula 1 team owner who was once married to a former Miss Universe
Nederland. As a teenager, Mol made computer games and was obsessed
with space. Aged eight, he built his own telescope. So, when Virgin
Galactic started selling tickets, he was one of the first takers.
But, as the years passed, Mol became restless. Eventually he
decided to hedge his bets: in 2010, he accepted an invitation to
become CEO of a small Dutch startup called Space Expedition Corporation
(SXC).

Michiel Mol
with a model of the Lynx II at SXC's base at Soesterberg airfield
near Amsterdam

Casper Rila

When Galactic was launched in 2003, SXC was just a vague idea in
the mind of its founder, the Dutch fighter pilot Harry van Hulten.
A decade on, there is a chance that SXC -- a tiny company with only
a dozen employees -- will beat Galactic in the race to be the first
to send tourists into space. "We are," Mol says, "David versus
Goliath."

Galactic and SXC hope to start taking tourists into
space in early 2014. Whether either of them can make any money from
the venture remains to be seen

Since Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter
space in 1961, fewer than 540 people have followed him. Of
those, just eight have been civilians -- and each had to pay
Russian authorities around £20 million for a week on the
International Space Station. This is about to change. SXC is one of
a small number of private airlines -- or "spacelines" -- trying to
open up space to non-professional pilots and oligarchs. From 2014,
up to four times a day, at $95,000 (£63,000) per head -- less than
half Virgin Galactic's bill -- SXC hopes to take ticket-holders on
hour-long flights from the Caribbean island of Curaçao to the edge
of space. For several minutes, they will experience weightlessness
and gaze at the Earth.

"I've not been there yet, but it has changed
something in all the astronauts I have talked to," Mol says.
"Being up there, looking down on this blue, green and white sphere.
You see the curvature of the Earth, the fragile atmosphere, the
blackness of space. It really looks vulnerable. It makes you like
an ambassador for mother Earth itself." Both Galactic and SXC hope
to start taking tourists into space in early 2014. Whether either
can make any money from the venture remains to be seen. According to a 2012 report from Tauri, a space and
defence-industry consultancy, the -potential value of the
commercial-space industry by 2020 will be $1.6 billion (£1.1
billion). But no one knows which business models and whose
spaceships will bring the industry to that point.

"There are people across the world pursuing potential
business models, many of them losing their shirts," says David
Southwood, president of the Royal Astronomical Society and former
director of science and robotic exploration at the European Space
Agency. In the late 90s, three private firms -- Beal Aerospace,
Rotary Rocket and VentureStar -- tried to launch commercial space
projects. All three were failures.

The industry, Southwood argues, is comparable to the
airline industry in the early 20th century. "In 1920, although we
knew that aeroplanes and airships could fly, no one knew what model
was correct," he says. "Certainly nobody could have foreseen the
level of mass transportation that the modern air business has
become, or that there would be no airships. Today I don't think
anybody uses airships. But in the 20s, they were probably seen as
as likely for mass transport as for aeroplanes."

According to Southwood, Virgin Galactic and SXC might
both be operating the 21st-century equivalent of the airship.
"Richard Branson and the people behind SXC are taking a gamble.
They're putting their money where their mouth is, or sometimes
other people's money," he says. "And I don't know which will
work."

The cockpit of
the Lynx II under construction at XCOR's HQ in Mojave,
California

Spencer Lowell

Harry van Hulten, one of the Netherlands' most
accomplished military pilots, has spent much of the past two
decades flying Dutch F16s, and test-flying new jets for the US
Air Force. Like Michael Collins -- who stayed on Apollo 11 while
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin strolled the surface of the Moon --
van Hulten served in 2001 at the Edwards Air Force test centre in
California. Like Collins, van Hulten's next logical step would have
been to go to space. Yet the only fighter pilots who did so were
Americans and Russians. By the time the International Space Agency
started inviting pilots of other nationalities to join, van Hulten
was two years too old to qualify.

Still, he dreamed. Every few months at Edwards,
notable alumni would stop by. Apollo 14's Joe Engle came to speak,
as did Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot a Space
Shuttle. One day, Chuck Yeager -- the first human to fly
faster than the speed of sound -- showed up. "It was phenomenal,"
remembers van Hulten. "These guys regenerated my old
dream."

Realising he couldn't go to space with an agency like
Nasa, van Hulten decided to set up his own. A year later, on
holiday in 2002, he came up with the idea of a commercial spaceline
and spaceport. "I just thought: if ever we were to turn what is now
aviation into space [travel], how would we do it?"

An answer came the next April, in Aviation Week &
Space Technology magazine, in an article on SpaceShipOne, designed
by a maverick engineer called Burt Rutan. Of all the designs
competing for the Ansari X Prize (which offered $10 million [£6.6 million] to the
first team that could launch a reusable spaceship into space twice
in two weeks), van Hulten thought Rutan's was the only one that
stood a chance. It was the only craft that would make a spaceline
possible. Van Hulten went back to Edwards for another year as a
test pilot. The attraction wasn't Edwards itself, but what was
going on down the road at Mojave, a small airport widely considered
to be the Silicon Valley of the aerospace world. It was here at
Mojave that Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, was developing
SpaceShipOne. Van Hulten wanted to see the company at work, "and
maybe figure out how I could buy a spaceship from them," he says.
"I wasn't counting on Richard Branson…"

In 2004, van Hulten learned that Branson had signed a
deal with Scaled Composites to develop a commercial version of
SpaceShipOne, named SpaceShipTwo. Van Hulten was back to
square one.

Harry van Hulten
at the KLM Flight Academy -- a partner of SXC -- in Groningen, the
Netherlands

Casper Rila

Anton Kreil, 34, a financial trader, wants to be the
first person to trade in space. Some time in 2014, once out of
Earth's atmosphere, he will use a simple satellite internet link to
make a currency trade worth $10 million. Kreil, a Liverpudlian, was
one of the first to sign up with SXC. Yet he took some persuading;
he'd heard it all before. In 2004, Virgin Galactic offered him
the chance to fly with them, but Kreil decided to see how it fared
before parting with $200,000. "There have been a couple of hundred
people who have bought tickets to go on Virgin Galactic, and
they're all sitting here years later," says Kreil, a former Goldman
Sachs trader who heads up the Institute of Trading and Portfolio
Management, an industry group. Seven years later, in 2011, Kreil
put his faith in SXC. "[Their] business model is very different,"
Kreil says. "They are believers in the Kiss principle:
Keep It Simple, Stupid."

The Lynx takes off horizontally then shoots
sharply skywards for three to four minutes, reaching supersonic
speeds of Mach 2.9

Branson's deal with Scaled Composites may have been a
blessing in disguise, as it forced van Hulten to shop around. At
one point, he and the company's president, Ben Droste -- a former
commander-in-chief of the Dutch Air Force, chairman of the Dutch
space authority and dean of the aerospace faculty at Delft
Technical University, who joined the company in 2008 -- even
approached Galactic to see if it could lease a spacecraft. But that
was before they found XCOR, another Mojave-based outfit, which they think
makes a more manageable kind of craft.

Getting into space with Galactic is complex:
SpaceShipTwo has to be carried most of the way by a second craft,
the WhiteKnightTwo. The extra vehicle adds expense and a longer
turnaround, and the nature of the SpaceShipTwo's engine means that
much of it will have to be replaced after each flight. In short,
Galactic's system has multifaceted variables.

XCOR's Lynx Mark II is a simpler concept: comparable
to a fighter jet, the Lynx reaches space without a support craft.
XCOR claims that its propulsion engine can be reused 5,000 times.
"In between flights, [Galactic] have to replace two-thirds of the
engine," argues XCOR's chief operating officer, Andrew Nelson. "But
for our vehicle, you put gas in, you do your checklist, you take
off again. We can do four flights a day, easily."

Each trip takes roughly an hour. The Lynx takes off
horizontally then shoots sharply skywards for three to four
minutes, reaching supersonic speeds of Mach 2.9. At an altitude of
58.5 kilometres, the pilot cuts the engines, allowing the plane's
motion to take it on into space, which officially begins at the
Karman line, or 100 kilometres above sea level. The Lynx then
glides through space for up to six minutes, turning on its back to
allow the plane's now-weightless occupants a better view of the
Earth. The pilot then brings the plane back towards the Earth -- a
move that will, for 20 seconds, apply a sudden gravitational force
4.5 times greater than that at sea level. Finally, the pilot will
glide the plane down to the spaceport, which will take around 40
minutes. Branson is sanguine about the competition. "I may be being
naïve -- there may be somebody doing something very secretive which
we don't know about -- but my guess is that we are five or six
years ahead of any competitor," he
said in Wired's March 2013 issue.

Nelson has a different perspective: he suggests that,
as with the airline industry, the most successful spacelines will
be the ones that have the fastest turnarounds. "You don't make
money when the wheels are on the ground," he says. "Ryanair are the
lowest-cost airline because they've worked out how to fly a fleet
of aircraft for low-maintenance man-hours per flight."

Michiel Mol in
front of Desdemona, a G-force simulator the size of a 20m-high
room, at the facility in Soesterberg

Casper Rila

"I wish I could tell you who's going to finish first,
I wish them both luck," says Michael López-Alegría, president of
the Commercial Space Federation, an industry body. He acknowledges
that fast turnaround could be crucial to profitability. "The closer
this thing can behave to a commercial airliner -- where you land,
people get off, you service it, people get on, and you take off
again -- that's what's going to make the difference. That's by far
and away the biggest driver in all of this from a business
standpoint." The advantage of Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is that its
cabin is large enough to allow passengers to float for the few
minutes that the ship is in space. But they won't be alone -- the
cabin fits half a dozen passengers -- and the windows through which
they'll look at Earth won't be much bigger than a Boeing 747's. The
single passenger in XCOR's Lynx, by contrast, sits in the cockpit
beside the pilot. They won't get to float around, but they will
gaze at the Earth through the plane's windscreen. Sitting next to
XCOR's flight captain Rick Searfoss, a former Nasa Space
Shuttle commander, they'll feel a bit like a copilot.

"What we are aiming for as a business is not
unlike what Columbus did when he set out to prove that Earth is
round"

Ben Droste, President, Scaled
Composites

"[Galactic] didn't sound such a great experience,"
says Dmitry Tokarev, a 23-year-old hedge-fund manager from Siberia,
and an SXC "Founder Astronaut". "You're with seven other people
looking out of a small window. With SXC, you've got a 180 degree
view, and you're the copilot. If SXC was sending people as copilots
for $200,000, I would still choose them over Virgin." Some 175
others have joined him, but in sales SXC is still behind Galactic,
which has sold around 550 tickets. Mol says SXC only need 75
customers a year to make $7 million (£4.6 million) and break even.
"The market is a lot bigger than either of us can handle alone,"
Mol says. "If there's only one of you, there's no industry."

Certainly the Tauri report says that the suborbital
space market "appears sufficient to support multiple providers".
Based on interviews with wealthy entrepreneurs, Tauri's researchers
forecast an initial market of up to 1,000 interested parties,
rising to 13,000 within a decade. According to an estimate by
aerospace consultancy Futron, SXC could be flying between 900 and
1,000 people to space by then.

The tourism market will be subsidised by the
launching of small satellites for third parties and from scientific
experiments. SXC has signed a deal with Wetsus, a Dutch research
institute investigating the effect of microgravity on aspects of
water.

For Droste, the potential of these experiments is
enormous. "What we are aiming for as a business is not unlike what
Columbus did when he set out to prove that Earth is round," he
says. "He had no notion of discovering the Americas, but he
did."

There is an image of a man's face on a computer
screen in a laboratory south of Amsterdam. At first he appears
calm. But, as the seconds go by, his eyes dull, and his shoulders
slacken. Then his cheeks bulge and a stream of vomit explodes from
his mouth towards the camera. An explanation for this can be found
in the next room, which houses a powerful flight simulator known as
Desdemona. Short for Disorientated Demonstration Amsterdam, the
machine resembles a roller coaster built from a giant Rubik's Cube
that rotates violently. The man who has just thrown up is
sitting inside.

Endorphins and adrenalin rush through the
astronauts' bodies, creating overwhelming elation once they return
to Earth. "It's what makes life worth living"

Dmitry
Tokarev, SXC "Founder Astronaut"

Desdemona simulates the experience of 3G -- the
force, three times that of gravity, that SXC passengers will come
close to experiencing on their ascent into space. All SXC
passengers will use Desdemona to train for their flights, although
Eric Groen, one of the scientists who will train passengers,
emphasises that the vomiting man has undergone a test far more
taxing than those for tourists. Still, no one knows
how passengers, who will undergo rigorous health checks, will
react to zero-G experiences, or 3G ones, or speeds at over Mach
3.

SXC passengers will have already been aboard the L-39
Albatros, a jet plane that replicates the experience of descending
to Earth from space. "You feel the blood rushing from your head,
and at the same time your body feels like it's being crushed in one
of those car-crushing machines," Kreil says. "It's like lying on
the floor, and six people are sitting on top of you... But, once
you're used to it, the most interesting thing is your vision. As
the blood drains from your head, you start to get something called
'grey-out'. Imagine if the world started going slowly grey -- and
then black. You can still function and operate but the world is
grey-black."

Endorphins and adrenalin rush through the astronauts'
bodies, creating overwhelming elation once they return to Earth.
"It's what makes life worth living," says Tokarev, a thrill seeker
who speaks to Wired from Siberia, where he's
snowmobiling. "You feel like you can do anything because
you're so full of endorphins. It took me three days to get back to
normality [after the L-39 trip]; I was bouncing around all over the
place. After space it might take me a month."

Like many of SXC's would-be
astronauts, Tokarev and Kreil don't have a special
interest in space and flight, but see it as a more satisfying
purchase than a new car or house. "I've been through those phases,"
Kreil says. "And it's not as rewarding as this is going to be."
SXC's customers are not all thirtysomething male millionaires:
their ages range from 18 to 83 and thirty percent are women. Some
are so passionate about space that they will undergo financial
hardship to get there. Dutch artist Leentje Linders, 71 this year,
is selling her house to raise the money. For someone whose work is
devoted to aviation, a trip to space "has to happen. It's such
a dream. I'm not that young. I never expected that it could be a
reality, and now it can."

XCOR's X-Racer's
propulsion is mated to the firewall stand so that an operator can
simulate flight

Spencer Lowell

SXC also hopes to pioneer long-distance
point-to-point journeys at affordable prices. Instead of taking 24
hours from London to Sydney, SXC imagines a spaceship that flies
there -- through space -- in two. The difference in environmental
impact is considerable: a 747 uses around 17,500 kilograms of fuel
per hour; the Lynx uses 750 kilograms, as it needs to power itself
only for the four minutes that it takes to get to space. Outside
the Earth's atmosphere, and during its descent, the Lynx glides
without its engine. Of course, a larger spacecraft with
200 passengers onboard would need more fuel to launch -- but
substantially less than a conventional long-haul flight, and the
journey is forecast to be ten times faster.

This isn't suitable for short-haul flights, nor will
it entirely remove the eco-footprint created by long-haul flights.
And it is uncertain whether suborbital craft will work for
long-haul flights. "We're getting ahead of ourselves," says the
Commercial Space Federation's Michael López-Alegría, who argues
that the heat generated by a spacecraft re-entering the Earth's
atmosphere after flying such a long distance would be too great for
the vehicle to handle. When the Tauri Group assessed the potential
market for commercial space travel, it didn't bother to assess the
potential of suborbital point-to-point flight. "I think that's a
pretty strong statement," adds López-Alegría.

In July 2007, three Scaled Composites
engineers died in a gas explosion -- the first fatalities in the
commercial space business, and a reminder of the dangers inherent
in the industry

SXC still has some way to go before it is
operational. Galactic has already built a Norman Foster-designed
spaceport in New Mexico. Van Hulten and Droste began the search for
a location to base SXC's operations in 2008. The pair were looking
for a tourist destination that was untrammelled by bad weather or
excess flight traffic. Eventually they settled on Curaçao, a tiny
island and former Dutch colony off the coast of Venezuela. After
overcoming initial scepticism from Curaçao's government, SXC
secured around $300,000 (£200,000) from the country's airport
authority as seed money, although this has since been turned into a
loan. The local branch of professional-service firm KPMG saw the
economic potential of the project, and helped SXC devise a business
plan. In 2011 SXC secured a long-term deal with the country that
secured the project's future. It had no Foster-designed space
centre, but it had something crucial: a runway. After signing
a deal for the spacecraft with XCOR, SXC turned to its next
challenge: securing investors and customers.

To attract them, Droste and van Hulten sought one of
the most prolific entrepreneurs in Holland, Michiel Mol. Mol had
made his name -- and fortune -- with a software business, Guerilla
Games, which he sold in 2005, before investing in Dutch Formula 1
team Spyder. Mol had also bought a ticket from Galactic. Van Hulten
and Droste approached Mol after learning he had sold some of his
motoring investments and was taking a back seat in the grand
prix team.

Mol is now leading the commercial side of SXC: KLM,
the Netherlands' national airline, is a partner, and 175 customers
have signed up. Nearly 100 are full partners who have already paid
the full $95,000; the others are "futures", who have made a 50
percent deposit. There are also "pioneers" -- $45,000 (£30,000)
allows them to take part in test flights.

SXC hopes to service its first commercial flights
within a year, but faces significant challenges between now and
then. At the time of publication, the Lynx Mark II was about be
test-flown for the first time -- the outcome will determine how
soon SXC can commence operations. Safety remains a major concern:
in July 2007, three Scaled Composites engineers died in a
gas explosion -- the first fatalities in the commercial
space business, and a reminder of the dangers inherent in the
industry.

An export licence also needs to be procured: the
spacecraft is officially classified by the US government as
weapons technology, so SXC must persuade the authorities to grant
it permission to move the Lynx to Curaçao. According to Nelson,
this is a formality. Nevertheless, it's still a bridge that needs
to be crossed. But in the meantime, van Hulten is acutely
aware of the financial risks he faces should anything go wrong.
"It's been pretty challenging on the family," he admits.
"There's a lot of uncertainty and risk involved. And me
being 44 with a family and a mortgage and a house -- it's something
you don't get into on a daily basis."

Still, that SXC and XCOR could yet become the first
functioning commercial spaceline is a source of some pride in both
Amsterdam and Mojave. "To begin with we thought we'd be the third
or fourth," says XCOR's Nelson. "The fact that we're potentially
going to be first is amazing to me."

In the meantime, Michiel Mol remains a ticket holder
with Virgin Galactic.